I think the claim that the 80's were fueled by the need to move away from prog, was vastly overstated.
I think it was more to do with bands like Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, etc. Prog bands like Van Der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Magma, Henry Cow had a pretty big following among the musicians of the more experimental side of the 80's (PiL, Random Hold, This Heat, etc.).
Also, prog is a lot more than what is depicted by ELP, Rick Wakeman wearing capes. So, tagging all prog with the words like: pomp, noodling, self-absorbed, etc., is not very accurate. Unless of course, one's only valid definition of "rock", is a stripped down, 3 chord, 4/4, musical form that requires extensive youthful energy, anger, alienation to convey.
I was equally not a fan of most of the mainstream rock of the 70's, as I as of the rock of the 80's. Because, once the surface "style" is stripped away, structurally, it was all, 3 chord, 4/4, verse>chorus>bridge>repeat song structure. And that bores me, whether it is in the 'style' of: punk, the Stones, New Wave, Eagles, Journey, etc,
I want: a very high level of musicianship, complexity, deep and broad range of emotional and intellectual content, avoidance of verse>chorus>bridge song structure.
When the punk/New Wave vs 70's rock fray happened, I was working at a well known record store here in LA called, Moby Disc. They totally embraced punk and New Wave, specializing in importing obscure and rare releases from all over the world. The store was a major destination for punks and others to buy their hard to find records.
And I certainly remember the (usually friendly) arguments between punks, New Wavers, SKA, Rockabilly fans about the superiority of their preferred genres. But I was a complete outsider to these discussions, because to me, they were all arguing over kind of small differences between genres, that, at their core, were really more similar than different.
There are plenty of punk covers of 70's rock songs (Journey and the Eagles have plenty), but could one imagine a punk cover of the complexities of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic", "Dreams Wide Awake" by National Health, "Köhntarkösz" by Magma, or "Inca Roads" by Zappa?